Learn about the ultimate guide to Facebook Ads for course creators with Shelby Fowler from Fempire Media in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS.
At LifterLMS and in our community we have coaches, course creators, people building training based membership sites, and everybody is asking and looking for ways to get more traffic. They want to do paid traffic, they don’t want to waste money going down a rabbit hole that does not yield results for them. If you’re someone who offers marketing service to clients as well, understanding how to leverage Facebook ads is also a great thing to offer, so this episode has a lot to offer all members of our audience and community.
The first mistake people make with Facebook ads is not spending enough money, especially if you are doing your own ads and you don’t have a background of advertising. A lot of people don’t have a point of reference for what things are supposed to cost and how long it takes for ads to optimize to become effective. Usually $10-$20 per day isn’t enough to produce an effective result for your program through Facebook ads.
Shelby shares a great example of if you have a webinar or a presentation, a masterclass, five day challenge, and your running ads right now, the average cost per registration is about somewhere between $8 and $12. If you have $10 and you want 300 people in your conversion event, then you’re going to multiply $10 by 300, and you’re going to have a rough estimate of how much money you’re going to need to spend to get that amount of people to convert into your event.
Another common mistake is that the creative on the ads is not great. A lot of ads are just not catchy enough. Many people are constantly consuming content on Instagram and Facebook and everybody is vying for your ideal client’s attention. There are many other people running ads and in addition to that, their family members are posting, their friends are posting, and celebrities are posting to get their attention.
If you’re interested in learning ads, and having kind of that Done With You Model, be sure to learn more about Shelby Fowler from Fempire Media by heading to FempireMedia.com. Also check out Shelby’s Fempire Ads Academy.
And at LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett:
You’ve come to the right place, if you’re looking to create, launch and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide Chris Badgett, I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS the most powerful learning management system for WordPress, stay to the end I’ve got something special for you, enjoy the show.
Chris Badgett:
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast, I’m joined by a special guest, her name is Shelby Fowler. You can find her at Fempire Media.com, she is a Facebook ads expert, which is something that you folks have questions about all the time, Instagram ads as well, and we’re going to dive into it today. Welcome to the show Shelby.
Shelby Fowler:
Thank you for having me.
Chris Badgett:
I’m super excited to get into this, and also you are a educator yourself you have your own academy, so we’ll get into that whole thing later, too, which is awesome.
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah.
Chris Badgett:
But first just to kind of frame it in for the audience here, we’ve got coaches, course creators, people building training based membership sites, and everybody is constantly asking and looking for ways to get more traffic. They want to do paid traffic, they don’t want to waste money. And all also there’s a lot of professionals in our Facebook group that actually, provide marketing services and they’re trying to figure out how to do Facebook ads and do a good service for their clients. So we’re going to try to learn as much as we can from you today.
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah.
Chris Badgett:
Let’s start with the mistakes, if somebody’s going to do… I’ve got a course and I’m going to do Facebook and Instagram ads. What are the top mistakes that you see?
Shelby Fowler:
Ooh, that’s a great question. The first one is not spending enough money, I think a lot of people, especially if you are doing your own ads and you don’t have a background of advertising. A lot of people, they have no idea what things are supposed to cost, how long it takes for ads to optimize, which is a fancy term of basically meaning, that when you submit an ad, Facebook takes a little time to kind of figure who your ad is for, who likes it, and to get it to a lot of people, right.
Shelby Fowler:
So one of the biggest things is just not spending enough money. I’ve talked to a lot of people and they’re like, well, I ran it at 20 bucks a day or 10 bucks a day. And quite frankly, that’s just not enough money especially, if your program, your course… If you’re running ads directly to a sales page, for instance, you need to be spending more money. If you have a large audience and you’re just retargeting the people that are in your audience, you can spend a little bit less money because they’re already a warmer audience. But when you’re running ads to people who have no idea who you are, you’re going to have to spend some money.
Chris Badgett:
Can you give us some sense just on that one, if somebody’s starting out, let’s say they don’t have an audience yet, and they’re trying to MVP it and just get some traction. What’s a range of daily or weekly ad spend to take it seriously for their first try?
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah. So most people sell their courses or programs through a conversion event. So if you have a webinar, if you have a launch of some sort, a presentation, a masterclass, five day challenge, whatever it is. And your running ads right now, the average cost per registration is about somewhere between eight and $12. So if you’re somewhat per registration, keep in mind. So if you take, let’s say 10 bucks and you want 300 people in your conversion event, then you’re going to multiply 10 by 300, and you’re going to have a rough estimate of how much money you’re going to need to spend to get that amount of people into your conversion event.
Shelby Fowler:
So I like to kind of reverse engineer it and go work backwards. What’s my goal? And then kind of work backwards, how much do I need to spend based on average metrics. Now, it’s going to depend on your industry, because we do have clients that are targeting attorneys that have their own law practice. Well, that’s a very niche higher end market, so that client is spending a little bit more for a lead, but that also they’re charging 30 grand for a program so that pays off, right. So and if you’re maybe a life coach, your lead cost might be a lot lower. So I’m just giving you kind of the average there reverse engineer, I would say if you want 300 people in your event, multiply it by 10.
Chris Badgett:
What’s another mistake besides not spending enough? What’s another big one?
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah. Not spending enough, and then I would say your creative is not great. So I see a lot of ads that just aren’t catchy enough, and I think everyone needs to think about, how much content we are constantly consuming. You’re on Instagram, you’re on Facebook and everybody is vying for your ideal client’s attention, right? There’s so many other people running ads, but in addition to that, their family members are posting, their friends are posting, celebrities are posting and people are…
Shelby Fowler:
I mean, there’s just so much content that you’re consuming and everybody is in what I call scroll mode, right you’re like scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. The idea here is that your ad graphic or video needs to be scroll stopping. So it needs to be oh, wait, that grabbed my attention, they need to stop their scroll and look at your ad. It’s the first thing someone sees when they’re scrolling, so they’re not reading your ad copy yet, they’re not clicking on the ad and going your sales page yet, they’re just looking at your graphic or video. So you need to make sure that it’s bold enough, it’s going to get the attention of your ideal client.
Shelby Fowler:
I see a lot of people put words on their graphics, that don’t mean anything for your ideal client. So let’s say it’s for a conversion event, make sure that the verbiage, the words on the graphics are telling your ideal client what’s in it for them. What are they going to walk away with? I see a lot of people just put three day sales challenge. Okay, but what are they going to get, are they going to get 10 clients in five days? Are they going to get, give them something juicy, tell them what they’re going to walk away with.
Chris Badgett:
If somebody’s not heard the term sales conversion event or, how would you define that?
Shelby Fowler:
So I would say a conversion event is going to be something like, it’s going to be a presentation event that you are doing to introduce yourself and it really establish yourself as the authority in the industry. So let’s say you’re a sales coach, okay, that you teach sales to entrepreneurs. Well, inside of your conversion event, maybe that’s a webinar or a masterclass it’s some sort of presentation. You’re establishing yourself as the authority, as the expert, this is why you’re good at sales, and you’re giving them some juice, you’re giving them some value for free typically.
Shelby Fowler:
Because you want them to have a quick win, some quick takeaways and realize, oh, she or he is the bomb.com. They know what they’re talking about and then ideally, don’t trust you, right? Because if we’re running ads to a cold audience, this could be another mistake here it’s really hard to sell to people who don’t know who you are. It’s a lot easier to sell to people who are already following you, who are already on your email list, who are already consuming your content. So when you’re running ads to people that don’t know who you are, cold audience, that’s what we call it. You want to make sure that you are having some sort of conversion event, because you have to establish that no trust factor.
Shelby Fowler:
Because they don’t know who the heck you are, they don’t know you’re an expert, they don’t know your background, they haven’t been consuming your content, they’re not on your email list right? So you have to quickly establish yourself as the go-to in the marketplace, so that’s really what a conversion event is going to be good for. It’s going to convert a cold audience into a warmer audience, right. They’re going to now know who you are, they’re going to know your background, they’re going to know that you know what the heck you’re talking about.
Chris Badgett:
For a fun that kind of has Facebook ad driving traffic at the top, I think there’s this mistake a lot of people point it to the sales page and they skip what you’re talking about. But if you were to advise somebody who’s maybe not that strong at marketing but they got a great site, maybe it’s this sales coach or something. And they’ve got a lead magnet, they’ve got a webinar, what’s a simple funnel they could do, should they point to Facebook ad at the conversion event? Should they point it at their free resource, more higher up on the customer journey? How should they think about where Facebook ads fit in?
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah. Okay. There’s a couple of different ads that you could run. My recommendation is to run them to an opt-in page or registration page for a conversion event, because if you just had a freebie, let’s say you have a free guide, it’s a lead magnet. You want someone to put in their name and email address, they’re going to get a freebie in their email and they’re on your email list. The hard part with that and I’m not saying those aren’t great ads, because it’s always good to build your list however, those do not quickly it is the long game.
Shelby Fowler:
When you’re building your email list, you’re not going to get a quick win here it’s going to be down the road that you’ll see a return on that investment. So I always recommend the quickest way to get an ROI is a conversion event. So I would run ads to opt-in page, where they just click on the ad, they’re going to a landing page and it says, register for this free training, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they put in their name, email address I would have them put their phone number, and I’ve seen some people ask for their Instagram handle, which I thought was really smart, because then you can message them on Instagram, if you needed to.
Shelby Fowler:
And then they’re going to register for that, and then they’re going to get emails and you can either do this Evergreen, meaning that it’s always running. Maybe it’s a prerecorded workshop or masterclass or webinar, or you can do it live. And I recommend if you haven’t done it before to do it live so that you can work out the kinks before you’re running ads to a workshop that you don’t know works. Do it live the first time until you can get a good conversion rate, meaning what that is, is about 2%.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome.
Shelby Fowler:
So 2% of the people that register for your event need to convert into buyers.
Chris Badgett:
So you mentioned there’s kind of this more long game opt-in prospect list building campaign, but then there’s the conversion event ads campaign, which is the best place to go if you’re really looking for ROI quickly. Teach us about retargeting? What if we have lots of people visiting our sites, but they’re not buying right away. What are some best practices around Facebook ads for retargeting?
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah, absolutely. So I recommend, if you have a lot of traffic or a larger audience, you can always run retargeting ads and they don’t have to be expensive, you can do 10 bucks a day because it’s a lot less expensive to run ads to people who already know who you are. And typically it’s going to be a smaller audience compared to the 5 million people in the audience that you’re running for your cold traffic campaigns. So I’ve seen clients do maybe giving a discount for, I’ll give you an example here. We have a client, who’s a coach and she also sells planners for real estate agents, and we retarget the people who go to her website to look at the planners, but don’t purchase, and so they get a $10 off coupon.
Shelby Fowler:
So they get that via ads, so there’s an ad that goes out to people that do not buy. And it’s basically just, hey, here’s this planner it’s an all in one, you need it, blah, blah, blah, blah and then it’s a $10 off. And so if they click on that, they are redirected to a page that they get that planner for 10 bucks off, right. So that’s actually yielded quite a few sales, and what you have to remember is that sometimes people get busy, so maybe they were going to sign up for something that you have or buy something that you have. But kids are calling in the other room, dinner’s ready, you get a phone call.
Shelby Fowler:
I mean, life’s busy for all of us, I’ve certainly have added things to cart and then been oops, forgot about it. And then I go back didn’t I order that, oh, I forgot about it, so retargeting is a really great way. Also for those of you who are not necessarily selling a physical product, or maybe your programs or offers are on the higher end, they’re a higher ticket. What I like to do, and this is very Grant Cardone, and I’m not a huge fan of him, but what I like to do is when someone gets in your funnel, whether that’s on your website, whether that’s following you, whether that’s joining your email list or signing up for something, you want to be unforgettable, they cannot escape you, you are everywhere.
Shelby Fowler:
So what I like to do is, constantly be running just like nurturing ads for five bucks a day, and maybe it’s a short two minute video that I’m like, hey, here’s a quick tip, blah, blah, blah, blah. I will run those for clients and ourselves in our business, because people will never forget us then.
Chris Badgett:
Top of mind.
Shelby Fowler:
Exactly. It’s just like being hyper visible.
Chris Badgett:
That’s cool. A couple more types I want to ask you about there’s the lookalike campaign. If we have a customer list, tell us about lookalike and if that’s worth doing?
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah. So a lookalike campaign or audience looks like taking your warm audience, an email list, or it could even be your Facebook following or Instagram following. And what you can do is once you have the information inside of Facebook, right, if you upload an email list, what you can do is then create a lookalike audience. Which means Facebook will take the data, they’ll pull the data from everybody who’s in that list that you gave them, and it’s going to create another audience that has similarities as the list you gave them.
Shelby Fowler:
So if your audience is, let’s say attorneys, you have an email list of 3,000 attorneys. This is I just coming up with this stuff on the top of my head here, but let’s say that you’re creating a lookalike audience of that, you’re going to get an audience that has similarities. Now, here’s the pros and the cons, if you have a very specific niche, lookalike audiences, don’t always work because Facebook isn’t going to just pull, let’s say all attorneys. It might be someone who went to the same college, or it might be someone who also has two kids and a dog, or it might be someone who also likes these certain Facebook pages, it might be someone who also recently got married, right.
Shelby Fowler:
It’s not necessarily going to work out for you, the lookalike audiences. aren’t going to be the best if you have a very niche market. However, if you have a little bit more of a broad market, they can work really well so keep that in mind. It’s really going to depend on who you serve and what you offer.
Chris Badgett:
Let’s talk about the boosting, the post thing, Facebook makes it really easy for people to spend money boosting a post. Is that a waste of time or is that something to focus on?
Shelby Fowler:
Okay, so I have a very interesting perspective here, because Facebook has a point system. Okay, we don’t know what our score is, but we’re all scored by Facebook and a few things that increase our score is having higher engagement on our Facebook page, and our Instagram pages. Okay, so and remember that Facebook owns Instagram, so your ads will automatically be put on Instagram as well. So when I say Facebook and Instagram, that’s why, so when your score is higher, your ads will actually perform better. Okay, and that’s why you’ll hear people who are just starting ads for the first time, say I have to seize in my account, which means, I don’t have any juice back here I got to kind of build it up.
Shelby Fowler:
My Facebook doesn’t know me yet, they don’t like me yet so I have to kind of build up my points with them. Now, when you have higher engagement on your Facebook page and Instagram page, you have higher points, right and then your ads will do better. So in that case, it’s good to do boosted posts once in a while, because it will increase your engagement, which will ultimately help your ads in the long run, okay they’ll perform better. So I would say in that case, I’m pro boosting, in any other case I am not for boosting post, and the reason why is boosting a post is not the same as running a Facebook ad, it’s not.
Shelby Fowler:
So when you create ads, you want to do it inside of ads manager, okay. And when you do that, you have a lot more ability to customize who sees it, to customize what type of ad, you have a lot more capabilities and it’s just a lot more options. So you want to make sure that you’re doing your ads inside of ads manager.
Chris Badgett:
Let’s talk about goals, Ziv in the audience was saying that for him, conversion campaigns, the cost has been going up a lot. There’s all these different goals like, video views, engagement, website traffic, conversions I mean, we all want conversions. But when we’re setting up an ad, which kind of goals should we go for, or where should we focus?
Shelby Fowler:
If your budget isn’t large, go with traffic. So if you’re wanting to get conversions, but you don’t have a lot of money to spend, then go with traffic campaigns, so that’s going to get the people to your website. It’s going to optimize your ad so that your ad is being delivered to people who are more likely to click on it and go to your website. Now, I want you to make sure then that you duplicate your funnels and everything in the backend, so you can look back there and get a very clear idea of who’s coming from ads. And you’re not mixing it with your organic traffic too, because when it’s all mixed together, then you have really no idea if the ads are working really well, because reporting is kind of a hot mess.
Chris Badgett:
I’ve made that mistake, could you kindly clarify what that means? So you really should have a separate landing pages and whatnot even though you have a Facebook pixel and stuff installed?
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah.
Chris Badgett:
And just explain that a little more, why that’s important.
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah. So let’s say your landing page that you typically are sending traffic to-
Chris Badgett:
Let’s say it’s a webinar registration or something.
Shelby Fowler:
Perfect.
Chris Badgett:
Okay.
Shelby Fowler:
So it’s the webinar registration page, I would suggest duplicating that page, copying it so that it looks exactly the same, but it’s a different URL, it’s a different link. And then you’re going to run only Facebook ad traffic or ad traffic through that one. So anytime you’re posting on Facebook, it would be the original link, the original page. That way you can see in your backend of your website, oh, I got this many registrations from posting on Instagram, I’ve been doing that every day. So you kind of have a really clear idea of your numbers and where traffic is coming.
Shelby Fowler:
And that way you also know what’s working, right. If you don’t do that, then you have no idea where traffic is coming, you just see that you have a lump sum of registrations and you’re like, I don’t know if this came from me posting on Facebook or Instagram or ads, I have no idea. So the reason why you want to have separate channels for these forms of traffic, is because the iOS update came out earlier this year and I’m sure we all know it’s been a pain in the butt for all advertisers. And part of that is that we do not have the ability to track the way we used to. And so-
Chris Badgett:
No, the Facebook pixel on a smartphone, Angela, in our audience was asking about this specifically with the apple updates. So you’re saying that the Facebook pixel can’t really track as well on Apple product?
Shelby Fowler:
It’s not. So, yeah and they’ve come out and said, it’s over 90% of Apple users have opted out of being tracked. So that means that if I’m on my Apple device, now I personally allowed it because I don’t like getting ads that don’t pertain to me, so I’d rather get ads that are stuff I like. So I am on an Apple device, 90% of apple users, they’re scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, they see your ad, right. They click on the ad, and now if you have opted out of allowing tracking, then Facebook cannot, once you click on the ad, we don’t know what happens, Facebook had has no idea.
Shelby Fowler:
And they’re coming out with new technology and software and things like that to try to figure out how to kind of remedy the situation, but it’s still not perfect. So that’s why we want to have duplicate funnels for things, so that you can see on the backend that it’s working. And we saw this especially, I’ll give you a quick story because I’m sure a lot of you guys have experienced this, if you’ve been running ads. We had a client and this was about in April, which was the height of the iOS, hot messary. Okay, everybody’s freaking out and inside of Facebook, it’s showing that she had zero registrations for her webinar or her conversion event.
Shelby Fowler:
And we’re spending money, oh my gosh, thankfully we had duplicate funnels, because when we looked in the backend, she had over 200, huge discrepancy right. Now, if we looked at Facebook, we would see it doesn’t work, the ads aren’t working, so we’re going to shut them off. But when we look in the backend we’re like, oh, they actually are working, and for what she had spent and how many registrations she got the cost was actually pretty decent. So what you’ll find is Facebook is either under reporting, so it’s re not reporting enough or it’s over reporting.
Shelby Fowler:
And that’s happened a lot too where Facebook is starting to because it doesn’t have data, it’s guessing, so it’s projecting what the results probably are, but it’s off by a lot. So we’ve seen this too, where people look inside of Facebook and they’re like yeppy, I have 500 people registered, and then they look in their website provider in the backend and they have three. So you cannot trust Facebook’s reporting, long story short. So you want to make sure that you do what you can to be able to track the traffic correctly.
Chris Badgett:
So, and if this sounds difficult, it’s not that crazy because it’s what we’re duplicating is a webinar registration page, a thank you page after they register, and is that it, a couple pages?
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah.
Chris Badgett:
That’s it?
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. You mentioned people doing video and images that aren’t really attention grabbing and how… First of all, video versus images, and then there’s the actual copy, title, headlines and text to go with a Facebook ad. What are some best practices there? Which one should we do, and how do we optimize those three things?
Shelby Fowler:
So video is awesome. I definitely suggest testing it, because we have clients whose video ads do really, really well and then we also have clients whose graphics do better. It’s going to be different for all of you, so just test it, test graphics and video and see what performs best for you. I’ll tell you that with your graphics, okay, with your images for your ads there’s a few little secrets here and I’ll share them with you. Don’t tell anyone, but one is that you want to make sure there’s not a ton of text on your graphics.
Shelby Fowler:
So Facebook will penalize you, they came out about a year ago and said that, we’re no longer going to penalize you for having too many words on your graphics. That’s not true, they still are. You don’t want half your graphic, all text, right? So make sure that about 20% of it is text and the rest is imagery. Okay, not too much text. The second thing is that you want to use brighter, bold colors if possible. Now, some of you are going to say Shelby, that’s not my branding though, my branding is very neutral colors and that’s okay. Then listen to my other tips okay.
Shelby Fowler:
But if you have bolder colors or if you have one color in your branding, that’s a little bit bolder utilize that because again, you have to stand out. Okay, here’s the other thing, what is Facebook’s brand color?
Chris Badgett:
Blue.
Shelby Fowler:
Blue, so try to avoid a lot of blue, especially that darker Facebook blue, because people are going to scroll through and it’s going to blend into Facebook. So if you can avoid using a lot of blue, you’re going to be better off, just because again you’re creating a pattern, interrupting someone’s mind when they’re scrolling. You want them to be like, oh wait, what is that? If it’s Facebook blue, they’re going to scroll right past it.
Shelby Fowler:
The other thing is, what is everything shaped on Facebook and Instagram, except for your profile picture and the stories at the top. Everything is a square or a rectangle, right? The posts are a rectangle, all the sidebar is a square, rectangle. You have the top of your pages are rectangles, your screens are rectangles, right? Everything is a rectangle. So again, thinking about psychology here, and creating a pattern interrupt, using more fluid shapes or circles are going to benefit you. Because again, it’s different than everything else that they’re seeing.
Shelby Fowler:
If you’re creating a graphic with some fun little splotches or fluid motions or circles, they’re like, wait, what is that because it doesn’t look like everything else. So just statistically, they do perform better, graphics perform better when they have those. So that’s the other thing. And then I am a big fan of what I like to call a combo graphic. And that for me means that my graphics and you’ll see them, if you ever see some of my ads, they’re pretty, they’re definitely ours. And that’s because we like a certain style and that is, we like to have the fun little shapes, circles in the background.
Shelby Fowler:
And then we like to have the client’s face on the graphic, because if I can see your face on a graphic, I’m now like you’re human, so I connect with you, right people enjoy faces. So that’s kind of our style, the other stuff that works is, just outlandish stuff obviously always works. So you’ll see some advertisers that will do crazy weird videos, and it’s just because they’re getting attention, so thinking about how do you capture attention? It’s going to be the brighter colors, it’s going to be the fluid movements in shapes, in your graphics and or something just outlandish.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Tell us about text, should we be doing these long form sales letters or should we have these real quick punchy? Like here’s the deal, here’s the benefits, here’s the call to action or both or what? What goes in addition to the imagery?
Shelby Fowler:
Okay. So the text portion of your ad is called copy, it’s called ad copy. And what you want to start with is a hook, so just like fishing, you’re going to put the bait on and you want to hook on your ideal client, right? So that’s the first, two to three lines of your copy, that’s called the hook. And that’s typically the only thing that you see in an ad. So next time you see an ad on Facebook or Instagram pay attention to this, because you’re only going to see the first two to three lines, and then it’s going to say dot, dot, dot, see more. So that’s why the hook is the most important part of your copy.
Shelby Fowler:
So you want to really capture your audience with that, and sometimes when you’re writing it, you might want to hire somebody else to write it. But if you’re writing it, it’s good to write the rest of your copy and then you can go back and change that hook. The next part is sympathizing typically with the ideal client, I like to always address pain points, because every single person has pain points. And if you’re not telling them, I see you, I hear you, I know you, I know what you’re going through, this is what life probably looks like and feels like, you’re kind of missing the opportunity to sell to them in many ways.
Shelby Fowler:
So that’s kind of a format that works really well for us, is going into then like, hey, does this sound familiar? Have you ever experienced this? And then kind of doing some bullet points of things that your ideal client is currently going through, and ideally these are things that you’re going to help them solve quickly. All right, and then you move into, it doesn’t have to be that way. I like to look at it lik I visualize this a lot, as if you’re standing next to your your ideal client, okay or customer. And you are standing next to them and you’re like, man you’re at the bottom of a mountain and their goal is to climb to the top of that mountain in front of you.
Shelby Fowler:
And you’re like, that’s a big mountain I know, and they’re like, yeah. And I’m like, it does suck down here, right? And they’re like, yeah, it does suck and it’s hot down here, and it’s muddy down here. And just like, look at your shoes they’re covered in mud and you’re sympathizing with them. And then you’re pumping them up to climb the mountain and you’re going to tell them, I’m going to get you to the top. So if you kind of imagine it, you’re sitting with them, and saying, I see you, I hear you, this sucks, but it doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to stay here, you can get up to there. That’s your goal, let’s get up there together.
Shelby Fowler:
And then you’re helping them on that journey, that’s what we’re all doing is we’re just helping people with a solution that you provide. So don’t miss out on that moment with them to empathize with what they’re going through. A lot of coaches say, I don’t want to bring up negative stuff, I don’t want to bring up the pain points because-
Chris Badgett:
They’re optimistic.
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah. It’s negative energy, but listen, you’re doing them a disservice, if you’re like, everything’s great, because it’s not, and you solve a problem. We all solve problems, so you need to be understanding that, they’re going through something and you’re going to help them solve it. So that’s kind of how I let the hook, then you go into here’s what you’re going through, right. It doesn’t have to be that way, here’s what we’re going to work on together, here’s what we can do and give them a promise, and then a call to action.
Shelby Fowler:
So the call to action should be sign up for my free webinar, or register for my free workshop and tell them what to do. Don’t forget the call to action, a lot of people then just end their copy without telling people what to do. And so people are like, oh, okay. You have to tell them what to do.
Chris Badgett:
You click here and register for the training we’re going to be doing, and for the webinar or whatever.
Shelby Fowler:
Exactly be specific.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Let’s talk about targeting a little bit, as somebody’s developing cold targeting. We can just use me as an example, I’ve kind of got two audiences, I have the whole speaker, author, coach, consultant person. And then I have this WordPress professional, who essentially builds sites for the expert industry or just the general WordPress site building agency, community. If I were to look at one or the other, if I went to the WordPress website building community side, who are building the sites for the client. They’re typically 25 to 50, there’s a wide age range, it’s split down the middle male, female.
Chris Badgett:
They usually are pretty, by the time they get able to do these kind of more complex sites, LMS, eCommerce, all this stuff they’ve been in the game, they’ve been building websites for at least two to three years. How do I target those people? And they’re all over the world, but there’s definitely more in certain countries and so on. So just using that as an example, how do we target effectively? What kind of things do we look at?
Shelby Fowler:
So I would look at first, make a list of your competitors. So what are some other programs or softwares that also serve your audience, right? That they also buy or they also like, write those down, and then think about WordPress, you can target people who like WordPress. Now, some of those people are going to be developers or designers, some of them are going to be just users, right?
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Shelby Fowler:
But you’re going to always have a few people slip through the cracks, so I would write first down your competitors. I like to what I call steal other people’s audiences, so I have people do this, new clients do this. When we start working together, we have an hour meeting together and I literally ask them who their competitors are. And I ask them a bunch of questions about their ideal client, because that helps us with targeting. It’s a lot easier for you to take an audience that already is interested in your niche, in your field.
Shelby Fowler:
Than to get really broad and try to tell people who for instance, maybe you’re like, I want to target college, graduates that are interested in computer science. Okay, that’s a pretty broad audience though, not all of them are going to be website developers and designers, they’re just not. And then having to kind of talk them into buying your program or looking more into it, you have to do a lot of selling. I would rather you attract what I call hell yes, clients, people that are like, yes, I’m already into this, this is great. I can’t believe I got this ad, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for.
Shelby Fowler:
So find competitors and typically they’re going to be people who are doing better than you, or have bigger companies and target them. So that’s what I would recommend. There’s a lot of different WordPress plugins that actually you can target, I know this because I had a client once who taught web development and that’s what we did, and her ads crushed it. So there’s definitely an audience out there, plugin companies.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Let’s shift gears into your journey as a what I call education entrepreneur. You have an academy, I use this framework myself, so I love seeing it out there, the do it yourself, done with you, and then done for you. If you’re an expert in something you kind of have these three kind of business models you can build. Can you walk us through the difference between the done for you, the done with you, and then the DIY Academy? That you’ve created, I think it’s super cool so.
Shelby Fowler:
Absolutely. Yeah, thank you. So I have a full service Facebook and Instagram ads agency, and that’s obviously done for you, clients don’t have to do a thing. They just approve graphics, copy, and they’re like, yey, they get an ad report every week. That’s really for somebody who’s at high six, seven figures plus right. It’s not going to be for somebody who’s just starting out on their journey or kind of skating by at six figures, it’s not really for that client.
Shelby Fowler:
But what I found was I had been running ads for a few years for clients in our agency. And I had a lot of people in my inbox all the time, which I’m sure you can relate to, and they’re just asking you ad questions or tech questions about whatever you do. A lot of you can probably understand this.
Chris Badgett:
But they’re not qualified for your done for you service, right?
Shelby Fowler:
Exactly.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Shelby Fowler:
Exactly. So, but they’re asking like, hey, I’ve been running ads and they’re not working, do you have any advice, can I buy an hour of your time, do you have any program or course that you recommend? Just asking me so many questions, I got a lot of questions asking if I recommended an ads coach or any of that. And so what I did was I did a lot of research in the market, okay, maybe there is someone already out there that does this, and I’m going to find someone so I can recommend them to these people. Because I was getting messages, a lot a day.
Shelby Fowler:
So I really couldn’t find anything though, there were a couple programs out there in the market that served either digital marketers, but never served the actual client. Like, hey, you want to do your own ads? There was nobody really teaching that, that I found. There was a couple of courses but again, there’s like outdated content. There’s some that I actually purchased because I was like, hey, maybe this is going to be something I can recommend. And then it would be like, the video was three years old, and I’m, well that’s not even how ad manager looks anymore, that’s going to confuse people.
Shelby Fowler:
And then what I realized was people were confused because they went through the training, they would go buy a course… I had a client who’s now in my membership in my program, but she was like, I spent three grand on an ads course. I went through it and then I had nobody to ask questions to after, so I felt like I never really learned anything because when I started to actually create my ad, I had so many questions. So that was kind of what most people’s story was similar to that. So that’s when I was like, you know what, I’m just going to create it. There’s obviously a gap in the market and I’m going to create something that is a mix between, a hybrid essentially, of a course and a coaching program.
Shelby Fowler:
So you have access to ad experts, to ask questions to, you can hop on live calls and get help, but you also have up to date training on advertising. So you can just go in and watch videos if that’s more your style, and then we ended up adding on, an ads coach. So everybody in the program also has an ads coach who checks in with them weekly and monthly and you get a one-on-one call with. So there’s a few people on the program that now have, six figure businesses. Maybe they don’t want to get on a group call, they don’t want people to know kind of what they’re working on. So that’s a good opportunity for them to kind of work one-on-one with an ad expert, and get their problems solved quick quickly.
Shelby Fowler:
So that’s kind of the model we ended up creating. In addition to that, we do one-on-one strategy sessions and kind of build something out with people. But the program we created is really a hybrid of DIY and Done With You because most of our members need someone to walk them through things.
Chris Badgett:
Or they have questions as they get in the weeds?
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah.
Chris Badgett:
This is a really important skill as an education entrepreneur, especially in a technical field with lots of jargon, ads and tech and Facebook and stuff. How did you approach creating effective training videos and whatnot, while you didn’t kind of talk over people or get too much techno jargon involved so that you didn’t overwhelm them and get them lost? How did you do that?
Shelby Fowler:
Yeah. We have a dictionary that we created, so it’s one of the first modules and they can go through like, here’s some common terms, right. You’re going to hear us say this, this is what they mean, and then they have a whole PDF that they can go through and print out. So I actually even have, my team has it printed out and they put it on their walls and stuff. But we do that, and I also make sure that when we hire new people, hire new coaches and stuff, we make sure that they fit our education kind of style, which is really simplifying high level strategy.
Shelby Fowler:
Because this stuff is really complicated for people, it’s overwhelming, it’s frustrating for a lot of people. And so we have to find a way to really over simplify it sometimes, and to honest, there’s still times that I forget and I’ll start kind of talking the talk and I’m like, wait a second. I could tell eyes are glazing over, I have to kind of pedal back and explain myself. But we try to really kind of overboard the basics, so people have an idea.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. That’s Shelby Fowler, from Fempire Media, femoiremedia.com, go check that out, go check out her Fempire Ads Academy. Any final words for the people out there, and other ways they can connect with you?
Shelby Fowler:
Definitely check out my website if you’re interested in learning ads, and having kind of that Done With You Model, you can look at Fempire Media, Fempire Ads Academy at the top bar of the website. You can click on there, and you can always book a free consult. So if you want to know if you’re ready for ads, or how much you need to spend, or if Done With You or Done For You is a better option, book a call and let’s chat.
Chris Badgett:
Awesome. So that’s Fempire Media.com, Shelby, thank you again for coming on the show, I get asked so many Facebook ads questions, which I’m not a great expert at. So I have this amazing piece of content to send people to now. So thank you so much, I really appreciate it.
Shelby Fowler:
Thank you for having me.
Chris Badgett:
And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast, did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode, and I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift, keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
